Politics and Poetry

Posted on May 11, 2004 in Poetry Social Justice

It’s politics Tuesday!

….the blood of children ran through the streets

without fuss, like the blood of children.

  – Pablo Neruda

They say: do not mix politics and poetry. As they have said ever since the first bard raised his voice in protest against the first tyrant. They say it, they who cloister themselves from suffering. For them, poetry exists to perpetuate the Illusion. I say that poetry must use obsidian to make the fine cut through the Illusion, to reveal the intimacy of anger and other human emotions.

I understand the madness. The poet listens to words. Her job entails getting down to their essence, using their feeling and their subtleties to evoke the heretofore unspeakable.

Political slogans are at once captivating and hollow. Where poetry strives to ennerve us with energy from our own sinews, slogans strike us with a flat shovel blade. The poet runs, her hands over her ears, screaming from the deafening fog horn.

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Amy Lowell wrote that she loved Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems except where he fell into “propaganda”.

I’ve been rereading Sandburg. What I see is a boisterous celebration of the rough people who built the city. I see him recording what anarchists, union organizers, and common people said to him, what he saw in their faces, what he heard behind the machines. Sandburg’s matter-of-factness merits no call to gather his pages for a pyrrhic purge. He does what a poet should: he reports visions.

C.D. Wright once reacted strongly to a white critic who told her that poets shouldn’t talk about the hardships that black people face or use word music to make calls for just reform. The critic suggested that poets stick to universal images, such as the white unicorn. Wright asked: “A white unicorn?”

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A poet who does not speak out to the contradictions she sees dies as a poet. Literature suffers, too. We would be poorer without the “terrible beauty” of Yeat’s Easter 1916, the ignorant armies of Arnold’s Dover Beach, and Jarrell’s ball turret gunner. Literature would be lessened if we lost these songs. Literature would be lessened.

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The poet must remember, though, Yeats’s rejoinder, that “too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart”. The rules for political poetry match those for love poetry or nature poetry or any kind of poetry: avoid sentimentality, avoid cliches/slogans, describe, and make music. We who write political poetry can easily fall into the hackneyed and pustulous, foully cute, start to sound like a militant version of Hallmark Greeting Cards. We must guard against that, retaining our individuality as we watch our words and images, toiling to bring out the subtlety of feeling and the landscapes of the dark planets we astronomers disclose in our scanning of the skies for the nature of compassion.

In this country where the amber waves of grain have been shaved, where we grow corn for cannibal cows, and the president, as a boy, liked to force firecrackers into toads, we must too, remember, to avoid the “terrible beauty” of which Yeats spoke. The Turkish poet, thrown into the bilges of a ship, stands as example to us. As he floated in that sewage, he sang. Nothing that the Ottoman state could do to him would rob him of his Joy. That is what must become most precious to we political poets. If we are robbed of that, the State wins.

So sing, ye, political poets, of the earth and its wonders. Sing the Truth, ever the Truth.